Long before the pavement, this high corridor carried Ute and Arapaho people between Middle Park and the plains. The stop sets out what the Arapaho called the route, why the Utes left trails unnamed, and how the oldest travel here followed corridors, not lines on a map, in the words of Ute elders the park itself quotes.
This route had a name long before it had a road. The Arapaho called it the Child's Trail, because it was too steep for children to ride. The tellings differ on how. One says they had to walk rather than ride. One says the women lifted them off their backs and urged them to toddle along. Another says they couldn't be carried on travois. All of them end the same way. The children walked. Look how steep this ground is. Somewhere on this stretch the road crosses ten thousand five hundred and sixty feet, two miles above the sea, and they walked it. Trail Ridge takes its name from the Ute Trail, traveled from time immemorial by Ute and Arapaho people. It was never one trail. These oldest trails are corridors, paths of least resistance from one waypoint to the next. Terry Knight Senior, of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, has said why no trail was named for a person. A name would mean it belonged to him, and the Utes did not claim the land. They needed no map, because they knew where they were going, and no name, because they knew where they were. There's nothing wrong with the names on the map, he said, as long as you're told they were given by whites who came later. Trail Ridge is one of them. Most park histories give the Ute an arrival date. Ute oral history has no migration story at all. Some Utes speak of three life zones, Lower Earth for valleys and canyons, Middle Earth for mountain valleys, parks and foothills, and Upper Earth for high rocky ridges and peaks. Across the high country of the southern Rockies, people built game drives, low lines of rock that funneled elk toward hunters waiting in pits. Older adults, women and children moved the animals along, and the point was the most meat in the shortest time, ground with berries, roots and fat into pemmican for winter. Pioneers looked at those walls and saw forts. In summer, Arapaho people camped in the high country with their tipis always facing east. The people who walked this route are still here, and two of their elders said it plainly. Clifford Duncan, of the Ute Indian Tribe, said Ute people have always been mountain people. Terry Knight said the mountains have everything we need, food, shelter, medicine, and water.
Photo: Jan Helebrant · CC0 1.0